In My Experience: Effort

April Nerd's Day.

2004-04-01T13:28:07-05:00

The first day of April brings out the inner dork of many content producers on the Internet, and to be honest, I think it's just a wasted day out there on the net with April Fools jokes that aren't even worth a "heh"...

Please be funny instead of bitter (savor the recursive irony please), obvious or annoyingly incoherent.

My long wireless broadband nightmare is over.

2004-01-13T13:50:20-05:00

Back in July I signed up for the only broadband option available (at the time) in my community. It was a bit of a pricey endeavor, but when you are a crack head, you'll pay anything, and so I went ahead and signed the one year contract. I knew not the mistake I was making.

After three months from the time I faxed my contract to the company, the wireless gear I need to receive the signal was installed in my attic. The connection was an 2.4 ghz signal blasted in my direction from a high powered antenna a couple of miles away. From my home I actually have pretty good line-of-sight to the antenna, so the promise of a megabit was believable, but I was really just drinking the Kool-Aid.

After the initial set-up, I was getting seriously slow connection speeds, and had to endure a couple of weeks of configuring, tweaking, re-aligning and hour long phone conversations to get nowhere, then one day, everything worked, and worked well enough (never reaching a megabit in speed though) to play games online and check my email and work from home sometimes. Sporadic outages were the norm though, and most phone calls to the support line went unheeded.

Two weeks ago the connection died with the destruction of my provider's gear by a crane installing the gear of a competitor. They were unable to get everything back up in working order within two weeks which provided me the right to end my contract. Two weeks. That's a long fucking time to be without connectivity at home, and the whole experience has soured me on fixed wireless connectivity. Even though modems are slow, they are RELIABLE, and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

It took me hundreds of dollars to learn that lesson.

Triple Spam Filtering doesn't work.

2003-12-02T16:42:34-05:00

This post is the virtual version of me whining about something. Disregard as you see fit.

Anyway, this site is hosted at Pair.com, who have been a great host for the 2+ years I have been here, and one of the great things I can do is run my own CGI's and other apps on the host (assuming I don't do bad things like gobble up ton's of processing cycles). One of the things I do is run my email thru SpamAssasin (which can be a processor gobbler) when I connect with my mail client (ie, Apple's Mail.app client).

In Mail.app I have spam filtering turned on, and I have a static "rule" set up that catches spam as well. In spite of this triple filtering, about 20 messages a day, that I consider spam, are getting thru, and almost all of them are for drugs (ie, drugs that either stiffen certain things or make other stuff less aware of it's surroundings).

I think one of the things I don't like about the spam I get is how insulting it can be.

Adventures in Wi-Fi.

2003-09-25T10:03:54-05:00

Long distance wireless connectivity is an art as much as it is a science. Such is the case at my house in Northern Virginia where the tech flies high and the stock crashes go so very deep. AOL is 5 miles away, PSInet and Alcatel used to be down the street from here, and now I'm getting my last mile solution from a local no name.

I spent two hours the other night re-aiming and positioning my pizza-box-like Wi-Fi transmitter in hopes of squeezing more bits out of the air. It's installed in the attic, and the guy who installed it there placed it behind the air ducts (big, insulated, round hoses) and low enough to be behind the brick facing of my house. No wonder he placed it there really due to the sweat laden efforts I put into moving it to a place where no duct work or bricks would be between it and the base station 2 miles away.

I'm supposed to be getting a full megabit downstream and 128 up, which isn't so bad when you consider my alternative is my AOL dialup account. I've been getting ~285 kilobits/sec for the last week, and have tweaked as many TCP settings as I am willing to fiddle with. Nothing really worked, but if I took the antenna, pointed it out a window, aimed it real well and connected my Powerbook directly to the antenna, I sometimes got 800 kilobits/second. That's almost triple what I was getting, and almost all of what I should be getting.

Back to the attic, which has no flooring. The "floor" is rafters and the drywall that makes the ceiling below and there's insulation everywhere, covering the floor beams, so walking around is nearly impossible. My wife insists I'm a monkey, so I took that to heart and swung around the lattice of roofing trusses carrying my wireless drill/screwdriver, Leatherman and Cat5 with me. After getting the antenna free from it's original 2x4 (one screw was bent) and attached to it's new home a few meters away, tests revealed an average 500 kilobits/second.

Aiming the thing was pretty easy. When I had the antenna in the window blazing ahead at 800k k/sec, I put it next to the vertical window sill, put a piece of paper on the horizontal sill, and drew in the angle. Back up in the attic, I did the same using the vertical truss the antenna it's attached to. I'm assuming the english-is-my-second-language-migrant-workers who built my house did a good job keep their angles straight. For the most part, I think they did, and that's helping me get better thru-put.

Just this week Adelphia started rolling out cable modems in my neighborhood. :^P

I pay for value.

2003-07-03T13:19:57-05:00

Rueters reports that "the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica are refusing to make their music available as individual downloads on Apple's iTunes Music Store." And here's the reason...

"Our artists would rather not contribute to the demise of the album format"

IMHO, this should probably read, 'our artists are only able to write one or two good songs, and then produce some other filler tracks, and then want to sell the whole thing as a bundled batch that costs way too much.' I mean, if I were an artist, and thought that only one or two of my tracks were worth buying, and that sales of those two tracks would necessarily result in lower net revenue, then I would resist Apple's method (of allowing album and single tracks sales for all music available on the iTunes music service).

[And, for the record, I listen to all of my music on my iPod as a full album, from beginning to end.]

The only point they make that I agree with is that "[They] can't let a distributor dictate the way our artists sell their music." Control is definitely an issue, and I can totally respect that. However, the snarky comments like the one above exemplifies the fact that the Chili Peppers and Metallica can't write a full albums worth of material for which I would pay $17.99. Commercial radio certainly agrees, because they don't play albums. If you want to blame someone for the demise of the album, blame pop stars, radio and MTV, not a distribution channel that offers you another outlet to make some extra cash.

Diametrically opposed to this is the Fischerspooner record on the iTunes service (entitled "#1") that is so good that you are penalizing yourself if you don't buy the whole record.

The bottom line is this: Apple probably needs to be more flexible, everyone wants control, and most bands can't write an hour's worth of good music. Market forces will sort this all out one way or another. Until then, I like to go direct to the artist.

[via MacMinute.com]

Swamped.

2003-03-14T14:41:47-05:00

This work week has been a long one with strategic shifts, personelle changes and personal (family) drama. Regular posts will resume next week.

Butting into the conversation...

2002-08-14T19:45:43-05:00

To: Cory Doctorow

Heya,

Re: your mail to Cam, Re: wireless AP's and liability, you wrote...

> When you provide bandwidth to others (provided you do so within the AUP of
> your ISP), you are an ISP under the law.

I'm assuming AUP = Acceptable Use Policy, and I think it's dangerous to assume any ISP's acceptable use includes sharing bandwidth/connectivity (you know about the Time Warner crackdown). Are the rest of your comments are based on a 'sharing is cool' policy?

Even is sharing is cool with your ISP, and even if "the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act indemnify you from liability" this doesn't mean you are protected from being targeted by a 'victim' of someone that might have been using your network to "utter death threats, traffick in child-porn, or illegally trade copyrighted works."

"Targeted" could be as simple as an email, or a cease and desist letter, or any other form of "you are guilty, now prove yourself innocent" situation. I think your vision of a connected humanity ignores the fact that there are a lot of assholes out there and the law is way behind technology.

My advice for normal average joe's with a new Linksys AP? At least turn on the WEP, even if it is weak. It forces people to *try* to get themselves on to your network which does two things; pushes those who want to use an open access point elsewhere (which is probably everyone/anyone) and makes them clearly in the wrong for using your network.

My two cents.

I want my Semantic Web...

2002-06-28T08:40:11-05:00

...complains David Weinberger who writes a cranky article about the W3C's (or more to the point Tim Berners-Lee's) vision of a Semantic Web. I won't waste time here tracing thru his comments, but will dovetail off the final (and perhaps only) point about getting the whole thing going...

Google ought to come up with a handful of [metadata tags] -- the Dublin Core offers a starting point -- and just do it.

Now, in a way, isn't that Tim's goal? Isn't that how things actually get done? Sure it is. IMHO, that's how the W3C is often used, as a future indicator of web technology, and then market forces take over. Meanwhile Weinberger seems to be complaining that no one is doing anything about this thing called the Semantic Web. I'd point to the RSS Taxonomy Module and the BackTrack routines in MovableType as leading indicators in the move towards a more semantic Web.

In fact, I'd prefer to see these sorts of experiments flesh themselves out, so the likes of Google can learn some valuable lessons before laying down their own version of Dublin Core (and possibly setting poor implementations into stone). In other words, you gotta crawl before you can walk, and I think we're crawlin' pretty well right now.

(One other point Mr. Weinberger, please include more links to the things you reference, like Dublin Core)

Piracy as a competitor.

2002-05-30T08:26:25-05:00

Pirate copies of 'Attack of the Clones' are already on the street, but the movie is making gobs of cash in the movie theatres. Eminem's new record is showing up as the #2 record in Gracenote's CDDB (which is what Winamp and most other MP3 players use to look up record titles) and has caused the actual CD to be rushed to market...

Analysts caution, however, that the real result of the early piracy will be impossible to untangle, whether sales figures are high or low. The online versions and bootlegging could serve as a marketing vehicle, whetting fans' appetite for the real thing, noted P.J. McNealy, research director for GartnerG2, a division of the Gartner research firm. Or it may cut into sales.

What are the odds that it will make gobs of cash when it's actually released? I think the chances are very high and if so, it probably shows that good content (or more to the point, highly desired content) will drive sales in spite of piracy. The opposite affect will hit second rate content where piracy will canabalize sales based on the low perceived value of the content (so the pirated copy becomes 'good enough' and there's no perceived reason to buy the real thing). Hopefully this will drive content producers to create and publish content that is worth the pruchase price.

Don't just be valuable, show it.

2002-03-25T23:32:01-05:00

Last week Boxes and Arrows made its debut, and did so impressively. One of the articles makes a timely point about meeting CEO's and other MBA types half way when you are coming from the world of design. The argument is based on wiring qualitative work (visual design, information architecting, etc) into the quantitative, balance sheet oriented mind set.

A while back, Louis Rosenfeld covered a facet of the topic in blog entry examining the ROI of Information Architecture. The tie in is that any provable ROI of 'designy' work makes the argument for having strong design and usability on a given project easier to make. And in times like these, you need to make any argument you can.

Many UI job ads are still ridiculous.

2002-02-05T11:45:02-05:00

I've been on the job hunt for the last several months, and have been reintroduced to the realm of the ridiculous job ads. It usually goes something like this...

Qualifications: 5+ years experience, C++ and Java, PostGreSQL, Oracle and UI frameworks. Knowledge of Photoshop, HTML, Javascript, CSS and usability issues. Excellent analytical skills, written and verbal communication skills.

Anyone who knows usability issues isn't an Oracle DBA or a C++ programmer. Anyone who knows Java has no tolerance for writing JavaScript (no cushy IDE's or API's) and tries to create their own interface solutions by inventing UI frameworks that are unusable to UI designers. Also, since this is Northern Virginia, many of these ads tend to say things like "must have active Top Secret clearance with full scope polygraph" (which indicates government work). Last, anyone who knows Photoshop has no business writing stored procedures. By now you should be getting my point that many (most?) job ads are wish lists. Scott Berkun sums up the point from a different perspective (sanity).

For projects of importance, you need divergent skills to succeed. It is not possible to find an individual with all of the skill sets needed, nor would you want to. To create a first rate website or software product, you need many tasks to be done in parallel, which means that more than one person has to be working at them.

Having been on several 'projects of importance' on teams of diverse experience, this point has been driven home, repeatedly. The continuum of experience, from those who know far back end to UI dweebs, will hopefully include sufficient experience overlap. That overlap fosters effective communication thru mutual understanding, and contributes to project success. Employers need to realise this fact and get realistic with their job ads.

Keeping perspective, from the outside or in.

2002-01-25T12:20:16-05:00

Last week most of the UI oriented weblogs/newslogs had a link to a Harvard Business School article about managing creativity. Unfortunately, you have to buy the article to read the entire thing, but excerpt is available which presented enough content to get me to pay the six bucks. The purchasing process was about 8 steps too long, and the $6 was a bit steep for such a short article, but I digress.

The excerpt speaks for itself, so I won't rehash. What I will mention though, is that there is an overlapping theme between this article and a book called Next: The Future Just Happened (another over priced, quick, but good read). The point is that progress and creativity tend to come from outsiders who have no pre-conceptions of the rules. These people are not lost in a pile of assumptions which blind their ability to view things from a different perspective. Harnessing that potential is a double edged sword with the benefit of profiting from new perspectives coupled with the possibility of smothering the creativity you need to forge ahead.

Some tips on being a Web Professional.

2002-01-03T17:11:48-05:00

Like I said last week, Webtechniques is always interesting. And the trend continues with an article in the February 2002 issue titled Groundwork for Project Success. This article echoes another that used to be available at UIweb.com under the title of "Critical thinking in web/interface design part 2: idea generation" but the site seems to be gone these days. Fortunately Google has a cached version of that article.

Both articles are well worth the read if you are going to find yourself as a stake holder in a given web site/application project. Note: Being a stake holder doesn't mean being an investor or a client. Being a stake holder is being someone who makes a contribution to the success of a given project (which still might be money ;^).

It's what you know AND who you know.

2001-12-11T09:39:18-05:00

This report at First Monday suggests that it's not what you it's who you know in the tech biz. When it comes to finding a job these days, I suggest that it's both. You need someone to get you in the door for an interview since the all of the doors are shut to outsiders, and when you get there, you better have 'mad skillz', because no one is hiring newbies.

But the report isn't really talking about getting a job, it's about the dynamics of those who already work together. And within that context, I think the report is spot on.